Why nobody wants to talk about being an ‘unmanly’ man
No matter how enlightened the modern world, blokes are still supposed to know how to do “manly” things but it’s hard when your “unmanly” qualities are regularly exposed. All we can do is avoid Bunnings staff and ladders and hide the shameful truth, writes Patrick Carlyon.
Patrick Carlyon
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It’s hard to be a man when your “unmanly” qualities are exposed day after day.
There are more of us than you know. We suffer silently, powerless to challenge the discriminatory assumption that blokes ought to be handy and curious about how things work.
We hide this shameful truth. There is no choice. No matter how enlightened the modern world, blokes are still supposed to know how to do things, like drill a screw in a wall or take the doors off a fridge.
We are the sons who first heard our father swear when we dropped a hammer off a balcony.
We are the fathers who outsource doing Lego with our kids, mainly because we can’t do it.
We are the men who find going to the mechanic more trying than having a tooth pulled.
We hear ourselves agreeing that the bill being three times higher than we expected makes perfect sense.
“Fair enough,” we say, because we don’t want to admit that we don’t know what a “loose pinion bearing preload” in a damaged diff is. Whatever a diff is.
We avoid Bunnings staff, and ladders.
We wonder at the time we once used a chainsaw and retained four limbs and a nose.
We don’t dream of bricking up the path to the clothesline because we know that if we did we would trip over uneven bricks and hit our heads.
Instead, we dream about paying a man to do it.
Our silence is sometimes mistaken for haughtiness. But it isn’t that. We just don’t know
how to respond when we are told the benefits of Bosch over Westinghouse.
Our condition should have a name, such as Desperately Useless Dunce Syndrome, or DUDs.
The only recognised treatment for DUDs is avoidance and denial, though some sufferers are known to self-soothe by boasting about how much they bet on a horse or the rumble of their car engine.
Flashpoints, such as untold numbers of tradespeople in your home, are common. The tradies are invariably friendly, hard-working, and up for a chat.
But the accepted rules of engagement, of late, have been stunted by the lack of football or other safe topics. The tradies are so enthused about the technicalities of their trades. They assume, wrongly, that we want to understand why we are spending so much money on their services, as opposed to privately bitching about the cost later on.
The tradies have taken over your home. They are the only reason you wake early and get dressed in defiance of your Hugh Hefner approach to isolation.
They have commanded centre stage in a circus of broken walls and sharp-looking instruments, while you hold a toy poodle under an arm and try to act “blokey”.
That’s OK, along with comparisons of your kitchen to London Blitz wreckage, and the squeal of jigsaws, and the fact you cannot shower, cook or wash because the water and power are switched off.
What is not OK is that the tradies want to talk about all the things you don’t understand.
The plumber has identified a problem.
“You’re gonna need a dual valve.”
“What?”
“You’ll need two valves, otherwise the tap will go whoosh.”
“OK, whoosh sounds bad.”
He isn’t finished. He wants to discuss the kitchen sink, not realising that, for you, the kitchen sink is a shiny piece of overpriced metal with holes.
“Um, what about it?” you say.
“Is it undermount or top mount?”
“Um, undermount. Or maybe top mount. It’s definitely one of them.”
The tradies asks for guidance
for the type of aesthetic choices you have never thought to ponder.
Should the lights be set at 450mm or 500mm from the ceiling?
“Um, what’s the difference?” you ask.
“Five centimetres.”
That’s the problem, of course. The blanker you look, the more tradies want to educate you. A show of ignorant curiosity may work for some TV journalists. It’s not so good when you ask tradies questions that reveal the unmitigated absence of your knowledge.
So the water goes down the pipe from the sink?
If the water is off, can I use the bathroom?
Despite these awkward snapshots to your sensibilities,
you try hard to sound knowing.
But you are dying on the inside. You want to say that you don’t know and don’t care, perhaps throw in some gratuitous swear words for cred. You want to storm from the house, toy poodle tucked under your arm.
It takes you back to Year 11 maths, and your inability to get trigonometry.
Or the scene in Lost in Translation, when Bill Murray’s Bob Harris character receives fabric samples faxed by his wife, and looked too demoralised to muster a sigh. Poor Bob Harris didn’t want to know what was happening in his home. He didn’t want to be involved. He had DUDs (among other things).
So many men do. Yet almost two decades after the film, no one, least of all the sufferers, is willing to talk about the paralysing affliction of being a man who is not manly.
Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist